James 'Bucky' Barnes

Generally speaking, the creature known as The Soldier could maintain a human appearance, for a time. Consensus among the observation and containment teams was that this was only because the host had been human once -one James Barnes- but no one was actually sure.

Mostly because no one was actually sure how much of the creature was some kind of mutation thanks to reverse-engineered super-serum and how much was due to the other experiments, the ones no one was supposed to know about but most of them did, if only because the threat of getting shoved into a portal or a cocoon in the deepest of sub-basements was an effective one.

Of course, the threat of being given to the creature to play with was just as effective, because some people didn't come back from that at all, and some came back changed, and it was why subduing it again when 'his' shape started to slip on a mission was always the preferred method of making sure it actually came back to base.

No one talked about the village in the Carpathian mountains that just went missing one day when the Soldier was late returning from a mission, nor did they talk about how it took two full STRIKE teams and the -then still new- Captain to wrangle the creature again afterwards.

That had been some years before, time was a slippery thing for the Soldier, and was definitely becoming so for the Captain, being the creature's favorite plaything had some -dubious- benefits, it seemed. Right at the moment the two of them were laying low in a safehouse, waiting for the extraction team to make contact.

The Soldier rolled his left shoulder, like the prosthetic was too heavy, or had a bad connection somewhere, which was entirely possible, but was also a sign that his shape was starting to slip. The tentacles could come from anywhere, and often did, but the mangled socket of that left arm was where they usually started first, especially when the mission was over and he had no real reason to maintain the still-human shape.

Knowing things, the Soldier had come to realize, wasn't the same as remembering. Learning about them from the outside wasn't the same as having the sense-memory of a place or an incident or even a person.

He was slowly learning everything he could in the hopes that it would help him remember something, anything and it had, sort of. The memories that had been like minnows, scattering whenever he got too close, were now more like shards of glass, cold and sharp-edged buried in the back of his mind, where he knew they were there and that they were solid, but he couldn't pry them loose without hurting himself twice over.

Something else he knew was that while he may have been Barnes once upon a time, he certainly wasn't now, though he wasn't entirely sure of who he was instead, nor who he wanted to be.

He also knew that Rogers was looking for him. That had been one of the first things he'd realized, that almost as soon as the man had been cleared from his stay in the hospital -one that the Soldier was equally proud to have caused and appalled by causing- he'd gone looking. He'd even gotten close a couple of times and the Soldier had had to relocate, always near Rogers' apartment, always where he could keep an eye on the Captain. Not sure why he was bothering, except for the fact that Rogers was the one with the answers.

Perhaps he'd let himself get caught soon. He was doing alright for himself, he'd been getting by, finding clothes wasn't difficult, nor was making sure he ate when he needed to, but only when it was absolutely necessary, never before.